Retired prison psychiatrist Anthony Daniels (Theodore Dalrymple) speaks and writes with keen insight gathered from his experience of the human condition and of its surrounding culture. Here is a short introduction of Daniels from the website Goodreads:

Anthony Malcolm Daniels, who generally uses the pen name Theodore Dalrymple, is an English writer and retired prison doctor and psychiatrist. He worked in a number of Sub-Saharan African countries as well as in the east end of London. Before his retirement in 2005, he worked in City Hospital, Birmingham and Winson Green Prison in inner-city Birmingham, England.

Daniels is a contributing editor to City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute, where he is the Dietrich Weismann Fellow. In addition to City Journal, his work has appeared in The British Medical Journal, The Times, The Observer, The Daily Telegraph, The Spectator, The Salisbury Review, National Review, and Axess magasin.

In 2011, Dalrymple received the 2011 Freedom Prize from the Flemish think tank Libera!.

Not only is Anthony Daniels a prolific writer and well-read, as you’ll discover, he is also well-traveled. His accounts of staying in five countries (North Korea, Albania, Romania, Vietnam and Cuba), all five of which operate under leftist-ideology based regimes, is recorded in The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World. Would-be fellow travelers in the long march of cultural Marxism, both young and old, would do well to read about life in the totalitarian state under centralized government. Daniel’s accounts would be especially revelatory for the would-be fellow travelers promoting ‘democratic’ socialism, the ‘gateway drug’ to full-blown addiction to life under top down government. Democratic socialism is currently being promoted as the means to secure peace of mind (aka happiness) by coercively and exhaustively taxing the wealthy and then having unelected central planners redistribute the take. The uninformed traveler could also read about the state of Venezuela.

I first encountered Anthony Daniels via his essays in The New Criterion, a monthly literary magazine I subscribe to. His extensive bibliography is listed in the Wikipedia entry Theodore Dalrymple.

Having read several of his books, I recommend, for starters, the book noted above and the two books shown below.

Numerous articles written by Anthony Daniels appear in the Law and Liberty blog.

Below is a video of Anthony Daniels speaking at the Property and Freedom Society Annual Meeting last year (2018). His talk on multiculturalism begins with the subject of rights as misunderstood and misapplied today. My take: rights-gatherers employ victim status leveraged with inalienability to secure advantages in society. With their Bill of Rumored Rights they seek to bypass “the pursuit of happiness” and go directly to happiness.

How did our culture get turned on its head? “German Marxists”…”Marx and Freud”…”the Frankfurt school… left-wing academics… Columbia University”…

[Italian communist Antonio] Gramsci also looked to culture. If the Left truly wanted to win, it needed to first seize the “cultural means of production”: the culture-forming institutions such as the media and universities and even churches. He saw societal transformation coming about by a “march through the institutions.”…

Gramsci insisted that leftist intellectuals needed to question everything, including moral absolutes and the Judeo-Christian basis of Western civilization. They needed to frame seemingly benign conventions as systematic injustices that must be exposed. This is where we got professors fulminating against everything from “the patriarchy” to “white imperialism” to “transphobia.”

According to the Metropolitan Police, “evidence of the hate element is not a requirement. You do not need to personally perceive the incident to be hate related. It would be enough if another person, a witness or even a police officer thought that the incident was hate related.”

Example given:

Had a message from Guildford police tonight about my tweets following an appearance on @GMB with Susie Green and Piers Morgan. Susie Green has reported me for misgendering her daughter.

What do you want? The Truth or a Lie?

The new/old Jeremiah Wright preachers of hate and exclusion want you to join them in bashing Whites, Jews, Christians, Tea Party members, Capitalism, language and… the First Amendment:

The Annual White Privilege Conference in Madison, Wisconsin 2014.

As you listen to the video below you will hear the devotees of this ‘white guilt’ cult parsing language to reprogram your mind.

“Some things are believed because they are demonstrably true. But many other things are believed simply because they have been asserted repeatedly,” Thomas Sowell

…These are the people who will teach your children in public schools.

No Christian should take part in this evil. Christians, rather, must be alerted to the evil crouching at their child’s school door.

As you will see and hear the White Privilege Conference gives meaning to Hannah Arendt’s once used phrase “the banality of evil.” ‘Normal’ everyday people within these conference walls are invoked to participate in acts of evil against humanity, even against their own humanity and against God-given human rights, human rights not based on the melanin content of your skin.

All parents with school children must be informed as to the evil going on right under their noses in the class room.

Here is part 2 of a 4 part series, “White Privilege Conference 2014 Part 2 of 4: Rape Is Not Intrinsically Bad” provided by the website Progressives Today (see below).

Much of what you are hearing today began years ago on college campuses: “Unlearning Liberty: Campus Censorship and the End American Debate” by Greg Lukianoff. Buy this book and read the specifics of how this type of reprogramming of student’ minds with white guilt/white privilege propaganda could grow into a White Privilege Conference

Save your children: Home School, Home School, Home School!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What do you want? The Truth or a Lie?

added 5-18-2014:

Group think, collectivist hive mindedness:

“When present, these antecedent conditions are hypothesized to foster the extreme consensus-seeking characteristic of groupthink. This in turn is predicted to lead to two categories of undesirable decision-making processes. The first, traditionally labeled symptoms of groupthink, include illusion of invulnerability, collective rationalization, stereotypes of outgroups, self-censorship, mindguards, and belief in the inherent morality of the group. The second, typically identified as symptoms of defective decision-making, involve the incomplete survey of alternatives and objectives, poor information search, failure to appraise the risks of the preferred solution, and selective information processing. Not surprisingly, these combined forces are predicted to result in extremely defective decision making performance by the group.”
(Marlene E. Turner & Anthony R. Pratkanis, Twenty-Five Years of Groupthink Theory and Research: Lessons from the Evaluation of a Theory, 1998, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 73, 105–115.)

“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell me, if you know so much. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone– God speaking to Job (38:4-6)

The current vision of ‘rights’ held by Progressives (the “anointed”) as contained in a quote from Thomas Sowell, economist:

“The anointed want to eliminate stress, challenge, striving, and competition. They want the necessities of life to be supplied as “rights” ~ which is to say, at the taxpayer’s expense, without anyone’s being forced to work for those necessities, except of course the taxpayers.
Nothing is to be earned. “Self-esteem” is to be dispensed to school children as largess from the teacher. Adults are to have their medical care and other necessities dispensed as largess from the government. People are to be mixed by race and sex and whatever else the anointed want to take into account, in order to present whatever kind of picture the anointed think should be presented.This is the vision of human beings as livestock to be fed by the government and herded and tended by the anointed. All the things that make us human beings are to be removed from our lives and we are to live as denatured creatures and directed by our betters. (emphasis mine)
Those things that help human beings be independent and self-reliant ~ whether automobiles, guns, the free market, or vouchers ~ provoke instant hostility from the anointed.”

Today I am asking questions. Explore with me the idea of ‘rights.’

The fundamental notion of Human Rights comes from…random genetic behavioral adaptations, the social constructs of a group of dabbling socio-political philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and John Stuart Mill, or as emanating from Kant’s Golden Rule-like categorical imperatives or as ad hoc thoughts based on current information… or ultimately and essentially from a Sovereign God?

Let’s start with what we do know about rights and where they emanate from.

Our US Declaration of Independence states that God Himself bestowed our rights and liberties upon us:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.).

Hold the “self-evident” thought for a second. Before discussing that a priori concept, I think we can all agree that all men are created equal (some people being more equal than others if you accept materialism’s income inequality as a proper test of justice. The concept of collective envy ruminating as social justice which soon demands tyranny, is wonderfully portrayed in George Orwell’s Animal Farm.)

An “inalienable right” defined: a right according to natural law, a right that cannot be taken away, denied, or transferred. In other words, you don’t own the right to rights. They area priori, naturally occurring.

Where does natural law come from? We understand legal rights as being those rights determined by man-made laws. But natural law, where does natural law come from?

Some ideas of natural or inalienable rights at the very least dates back to the Greek Stoics – Hellenistic Philosophers were concerned about cosmic determinism and free will. They maintained that proper behavior, not words alone but well-meaning-self-limiting actions, revealed one’s non-predetermined or free will “rights.”

Later, Catholic law would take up the strophe. Then it passed to the Middle Ages after which it coursed through the Reformation then the Enlightenment and right up to my post today. I write this post within a God-bestowed natural law and a man-made legal right of free speech. How convenient!

Are natural rights only generated from reason as Immanuel Kant ‘reasoned’ or are they God-given and then realized? Atheists might prefer man-made reason as opposed to an Intelligent Designer. But the source of their own reasoning is left outside the premises (yeah, I know).

But, If we start with a Intelligent Designer who spoke the Big Bang into existence and then, as most scientists do, recognize an orderly precisely tuned universe held together by four fundamental physical constants called gravity, the strong and weak nuclear forces and electromagnetism and the thought that perhaps all four constants are manifestation of a single underlying and unifying force then we eventually and evidentially return to an Intelligent Designer.

This Intelligent Designer (ID) decided, that after everything had cooled down from the monstrously hot plasma occurring from the Big Bang, that out of the annihilating ’battle’ between the equal forces of matter and anti-matter, that matter would ‘carpe diem’ –seize the day.

This programmed mismatch of matter over antimatter became our physical Genesis, our physical beginnings. We came forth out of God’s spoken word as Remnants of an exploding universe. And, this genesis is recorded in the elements and compounds that compose our very bodies. But there is more to us than what you see and carry around with you.

Now, this same Designer wrote the book on His universe – the Holy Scriptures. This book doesn’t lay out the physical constants. The Book assumes them to be already at work.

It is from man’s earliest recorded philosophy book The Book of Job that we learn about God’s ways with mankind. The discourse between God and man ultimately leads to Job’s sevenfold blessing but not without a lot of hard lessons learned about a human’s ‘rights’ along the way. The Intelligent Designer didn’t have to speak at all but he did speak and made Himself known. He gave Job the right to speak but up to a point. This is natural law in early human drama.

In Genesis we learn that God gave man and woman the ‘right’ to eat of every tree in the garden except for a certain tree. “Don’t go there,” God said. “That is not your right.” This is natural law revealed in the earliest human drama known to man.

Boundaries, like physical constants that keep us from spinning out of control, were set in place for mankind. Do most anything but don’t do ‘these’ things I have told you about. You have this right but not this right. There are only God-known reasons for specific dos and don’ts. This is natural law.

Example: God decided that if the weak nuclear force, this specific one out of the four physical constants, if it varied at all from its constant ‘duty’ it would mean the instant destruction of our planet by the sun. I’m glad God is not fickle. He deals in constants.

Well, man’s free will, unlike gravity, is free to transgress some of God’s prescribed boundaries. So, knowing this beforehand, God wrote things he wanted his people to know in stone – the Ten Commandments. This is natural law.

“Thou shalt…” is not a warranty list of dos and don’ts that would keep the manufacturer happy and out of the picture if you practiced them. This list is an acknowledgment of our natural rights within prescribed boundaries, within constants. This list is the first Bill of Rights and it is not open-ended. It is constrained by justice in dealing with your fellow man.

Something to think about: “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

Self-evident truth? Like the four physical constants that scientists have discovered and then verified and now count on to be the same day after day?

As stated above, mankind is endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that are self-evident. Truths, inalienable rights, natural law…self-evident. Sound familiar?

The Apostle Paul wrote about self-evident truth in Romans Chapter 5:

Romans 5:18

For the wrath of God is unveiled from heaven against all the ungodliness and injustice performed by people who use injustice to suppress the truth. What can be known about God, you see, is plain to them, since God has made it plain to them. There are, of course, things about God which can’t been known and seen: namely, his eternal power and deity. But ever since the world was created, they have known and seen in things that he has made. As a result, they have no excuse: they knew God, but didn’t honor him as God or thank him. Instead, they learned to think in useless ways, and their unwise heart grew….they did not see fit to hold on to a knowledge of God, God gave them up to an unfit mind, so that they would behave inappropriately. (emphasis mine)

“They learned to think in useless ways…”

Johns Stuart Mill proposed that truth and virtue originate from unconventional wisdom and by living as a non-conformist also known as his ‘experiments in living. Mill didn’t reflect on the Big picture.

Self-centered individualism and thinking in useless ways with unwise hearts while refusing acknowledgment of God have become the ‘constants’ of our souls. It has made us self-indulgent and ‘preachy’ about Human Rights while denying the self-evident truth.

At all times we are free to acknowledge God and discourse with Him or not. God’s grace as revealed in Jesus’ death and resurrection allows us to have a discussion with Him about our sin. The natural law is still in place but be we are now able to abide by it using the Constant power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus did not come, as he said, to destroy the law and the prophets. The natural law he planted as a cornerstone is still there.

Man’s pride, his ‘right’ to be atheistic may keep him from discourse with God, but God is Constant. He is righteously faithful to his word.

It is important to note that the single underlying, unifying assumption behind the list of “Ten” is that mankind has been given freedom to do whatever he wills, even fly, (but only within the constants of physics).

We all agree that Man was created with natural rights ~ a freedom to act. But after the Fall man’s rights lost their constant factor, their electromagnetic compass needle which always pointed toward God.

Inalienable rights are great but to be of any meaning they need the boundaries and the foundation cornerstone of natural law already in place whereby we align our lives with self-evident truth.

Without that compass needle or the cornerstone our ‘rights’ have become “values”, values that ‘search’ much like valence electrons looking for a place to park in a hook-up culture. One’s identity is no longer elementary and stable. And, our human rights crusades end in cruel and foolish anti-human jokes such as Global Warming.

The idea of Human Rights. Does it come from…random genetic behavioral adaptations, a French philosopher, from ‘experiments in living,’ ad hoc thoughts based on current information, an inordinate desire to “want the necessities of life to be supplied as rights” or from an Intelligent Designer who set them in place in order to show His love for us?

A nation that returned to God would be a nation that returned to Intelligent Design, to its cornerstone… and to its right mind. And, Human Rights could then be lazar-aligned from a fixed place in the universe.

Shall mortal man be more just than God? shall a man be more pure than his maker?Job, 4. 17

Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him: but I will maintain mine own ways before him.Job, 13. 15

“Mortals, born of woman, are of few days and full of trouble.

They spring up like flowers and wither away; like fleeting shadows, they do not endure.Job, 14. 1

Miserable comforters are ye all.Job, 16. 2

“Can you bind the chains of the Pleiades? Can you loosen Orion’s belt?

Can you bring forth the constellations in their seasons or lead out the Bear with its cubs?

Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set up God’s dominion over the earth?

“Can you raise your voice to the clouds and cover yourself with a flood of water?

Do you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?

Who gives the ibis wisdom or gives the rooster understanding?…

Who provides food for the raven when its young cry out to God and wander about for lack of food? Job, 38. 31-41

“Look at Behemoth, which I made along with you and which feeds on grass like an ox.

Job, 40. 15

“So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning.”Job, 42. 12

O Radiant Dawn – James MacMillian

THIS SIDE OF PARADISE

“We have entered, as I see it, a spiritual limbo. Our educational institutions are no longer the bearers of high culture, and public life has been deliberately moronised. But here and there, sheltered from the noise and glare of the media, the old spiritual forces are at work” Roger Scruton

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“When a common culture declines, the ethical life can be sustained and renewed only by a work of the imagination.”-Roger Scruton
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“Jesus prayed, “This is eternal life, that they may know You . . .” (John 17:3). The real meaning of eternal life is a life that can face anything it has to face without wavering. If we will take this view, life will become one great romance— a glorious opportunity of seeing wonderful things all the time. God is disciplining us to get us into this central place of power.” Oswald Chambers
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“No power on earth or in hell can conquer the Spirit of God in a human spirit, it is an inner unconquerableness.” Oswald Chambers
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To those who have had no agony Jesus says, “I have nothing for you; stand on your own feet, square your own shoulders. I have come for the man who knows he has a bigger handful than he can cope with, who knows there are forces he cannot touch; I will do everything for him if he will let Me. Only let a man grant he needs it, and I will do it for him.” The Shadow of an Agony,Oswald Chambers
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“If we wish to erect new structures, we must have a definite knowledge of the old foundations.” John Calvin Coolidge
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Atheism is a post-Christian phenomenon.
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If social justice looks like your hand in someone else’s pocket then you are stealing.
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“In Sweden, giving to charity, absurdly, came to be considered a lack of solidarity, since it undermined the need for the welfare state.” – Roland Martinsson
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“…to love democracy well, it is necessary to love it moderately.” Alexis de Tocqueville
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Capitalism seeks to help others through a servce or product it provides. Free Market Capitalism is the most moral and fair economic system available to man. Capitalism augments personal growth, responsibility and ownership. Charity flourishes under capitalism. Charity dies under subjective “fair share” government confiscatory policies. Socialism redistributes ambivalence and greed.
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“We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.” G.K. Chesterton
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Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent.
It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction. Albert Einstein
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“You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd.” Flannery O’Connor
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“There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.” C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
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“Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15).
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God’s grace is not about the allowance for sin. God’s grace is about the conversation God allows regarding sin.
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From the book of Proverbs: We are not to favor the rich or the poor. We are to pursue justice.
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“Always keep in contact with those books and those people that enlarge your horizon and make it possible for you to stretch yourself mentally.” Oswald Chambers
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One goldfish says to another, “If there is no God who keeps changing the water?”
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“The truth is always there in the morning.”
From Cat On A Hot Tin Roof script – playwright Tennessee Williams
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God blesses those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be satisfied.
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“America’s greatness has been the greatness of a free people who shared certain moral commitments. Freedom without moral commitment is aimless and promptly self-destructive.” John W. Gardner
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“Men of integrity, by their very existence, rekindle the belief that as a people we can live above the level of moral squalor. We need that belief; a cynical community is a corrupt community.” John W. Gardner
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“In the world it is called Tolerance, but in hell it is called Despair, the sin that believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and remains alive because there is nothing for which it will die.” Dorothy L. Sayers
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“Art, like morality, consists of drawing the line somewhere.”
G. K. Chesterton
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“The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man.” Alexander Solzhenitsyn
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This is what the LORD says:

“Stand at the crossroads and look;
ask for the ancient paths,
ask where the good way is, and walk in it,
and you will find rest for your souls.
But you said, ‘We will not walk in it.’

-The prophet Jeremiah, 6:16
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“…our common task is not so much discovering a truth hiding among contrary viewpoints as it is coming to possess a selfhood that no longer evades and eludes the truth with which it is importunately confronted.” James McClendon, Ethics: Systematic Theology, Vol. 1
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